


The Devil You Know and I Don't Disagree

by by_no_one_more_than_me (Lady_Cleo)



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Banter with a delusion, Depression, F/M, Inner Dialogue, Kilgrave is a walking trigger, My First Work in This Fandom, Rated for Language & Canon-compliant twistedness, Why Did I Write This?, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 13:14:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15413721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Cleo/pseuds/by_no_one_more_than_me
Summary: He's in her head. It's all in her head. It's not real. He's not real.Jessica's thoughts during 2x11, "Three Lives and Counting"title from "Quit" by cashmere cat.





	The Devil You Know and I Don't Disagree

**Author's Note:**

> Just for the record: I like this show. I think Jessica is amazing and a realistic portrayal of what someone who's lived through what she did would be like. I love David Tennant. I like the character of Kilgrave. I hate what he does. It's good that he's dead. I'm... also glad he's back.

He's in her head. It's all in her head. It's not real. He's not real.

He's just...  ** _there_**.

His voice in her head last night. The sound of his clapping like slaps, ironic and painful. An immaterial witness, dematerialized with a simple command. But nothing with him is ever easy.

She's drowning but there's warm water on her body like a perverse baptism, his hands on her like a twisted benediction, his voice in her ear like a jagged blessing. She can almost feel the perpetual stubble grazing the join of shoulder and neck, that spot he loved so much when he was holding her. (Down. The asshole held her  _down_. She forces the words into her skin like a broken bottle.) Still, she hates the way the tension bleeds out of her, just for a second, at the phantom pressure on her taut muscles, corded like braided steel cable, stronger than woven spider silk. The praise she doesn't want, will never accept. Cannot admit she needs, just a little.

Except... shit. No matter the projections of attitude, the enforced solitude, the isolation, the desolation, the powers that weaken her... every little girl wants to make their mom proud. Every hero (secretly) wants someone to tell them they're doing good, not just doing well. And even a beat dog will crave the affection of its master's hand.

**Fuck that**. Kilgrave is not - has never been, will NEVER be - the master of her. She is the mistress of this commandeered broke-down vessel she calls a life, and she makes her own fate, and lets herself believe that's why everything will always be shit. Endless miles of shitty busted bloodstained concrete, shattered under her steps, with the occasional struggling flower clinging tenaciously to life in the cracks, desperate to be a little pop of color, a tiny ray of hope. She never _wants_ to rip them up by the roots and crush them under her boots but she always seems to do just that. They grow anyway.

But... he's proud of her, the way her mom is proud of her, for removing a bad element like a poisoned thorn... and she doesn't know if that means she's proud of herself for doing something so wrong for a right reason.

They're in the motel room, tacky in every sense of the word. She can practically smell the industrial-grade spermicide mixed in with the detergent, hear the tick-tock of the clock of hourly rates.  _How many pornos have been shot in_ **these** _rooms_ , she thinks bitterly.

And there he is, laid on a bed he'd never degrade himself to look at, let alone sprawl atop, if he were really alive. She hates him. Even if he is just a little helpful. It's all in her head! She knows that.  **She's**  helping herself. Like she always has, like she's always had to. But just for a moment, before they leave, he's splayed on that deceptively clean (looking) bedspread and she lays down too. Can't bring herself to reach out, doesn't let him touch her. But they lie there, and he's on his side staring at her the way she's focused laser-tight on the ceiling and imagining bodily fluids dripping off it like acid rain, and the side that's closest to him is warmer than the side that's not.

She's exchanging banter with a delusion. Christ, she needs therapy. He can't have been _this_  good at it when he was alive. She's making him this way, a wall to bounce ideas off of and throw things at and punch when she's frustrated. It's all in her head. The wall isn't actually hitting back, it's not talking. It's not... flirting.

There's too many of them. One, then two, then so many, calling for attention, diverting her, splitting her, trying to draw and quarter (or whatever the fraction is for however many of them there are now.) She can't look at any of them. Malcolm or the Kilgraves plural. God forbid she see a reflective surface right now. Even the version she tries to squeeze the life out of - the only one she looks in the eye - isn't real. None of them are. He's not real. It's all in her head. She knows that. She still runs.

Trish is an impulsive, self-destructive moron and they'll deal with that later. She can beat non-life-threatening sense into her sister later. Right now Trish is bleeding and Karl is responsible and Jessica is seeing SO much more red than the oozing needle marks on Trish's back and the dark wine motor oil leaking from her mouth, or the burgundy of her mother's prison duds, or the natural perpetual just-kissed-bruise shade of her own lips that are opening and closing, screaming and talking and threatening. She can feel the shivers in her body, the beast throwing itself against the bars of the cage, the adrenaline and norepinephrine and other chemicals in a potent cocktail coursing through her bloodstream like a junkie marathon. Emotional surges and fear and bloodlust and the shredding white-knuckle control making her tremble. His voice in her ear is not helping, even as his words start coming out of her mouth. She wants him dead. The monster needs to die. He's hurt so many people, not just the ones close to her, not just her.

_Who's she talking about?_

She can't do this. She won't do this. 

Damn. Her mother is going to hate it, but she can't talk Karl out of this bizarrely timed act of destructive retribution, using his blood to blot out the staggering volumes of red in his ledger. So she grabs Trish and runs, beats the fireball and hail of glass by a second or two, lets herself breathe on the sidewalk while she cradles Trish's body in her arms, then picks her back up and runs 4 miles to the hospital.

She doesn't want Malcolm here. They're twins, or maybe cousins, bound by the relative nature of their profound fucking-over by a certain dead Brit manipulator. But. She'd relied on him, and he'd lied, gone behind her back, blown a plan she didn't even want to be part of, and stuck his dick in her sister and several other consenting adult females, and she's done. She was better before, when she didn't let anyone in. Alone sucks but it's safe. She knows better. She said it herself, to herself, through the filter of Kilgrave because she already hates everything that comes out of his mouth and one more unpleasant thing isn't gonna matter, whether it's true or not. She does (seem to) invite betrayal (or feel like she does.) Alone is better. A killer in her head is better than one on the streets, and she's stronger than he'll ever be in one very important way. Sitting there in the violet-flooded waiting room, watching distant lights play over her reflection, she tells them both that she has the power. Not just the powers she doesn't want, never asked for, but a real ability - to control her actions, her thoughts, herself. It's a good thing, to be scared of what you're capable of becoming, to know how to stop yourself, to hope you can become something better.

It  _should_  terrify her, and it does. And she can change. She is more than all the shitty broken pieces she carries around, more than the fractured burnout picture on the box of the puzzle that is Jessica Jones. She's not Kilgrave, she's not her mother, she's not her powers. She is herself. That's enough. She is enough.

And he'll leave when she tells him to, to slink back to that iron and bulletproof glass box in the dark realm of her mind that she cannot seem to keep sealed and buried for all her strength, to wait until he's needed again. She wants to tell him she'll never need him. Never.  ** _NEVER._**  

Never again.

She wants to. 

She doesn't.

Because he's gone and that's enough right now.

Because if she's being honest with herself - and doesn't that prospect just scare the purple piss right out of her? - she isn't 100% certain that she won't.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea why I wrote this except that I did. Started and didn't stop and this is what I had when it was over.  
> Have whatever reactions you have. Comment if you want.  
> I'm gonna go contemplate my life choices in a dark room.


End file.
